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Björk reportedly told McQueen that the person who wrote Homogenic was someone who “had to become a warrior, a warrior who had not to fight with weapons but with love.”

« After Homogenic, I would say I pretty much picked all the garments that I wore on my sleeves [album covers]. But in this one, I pretty much walked into a relationship that was between Nick Knight and Alexander McQueen. They had already done a few images that were quite feisty, and were kind of experimenting. In those years, you didn’t really do stuff digitally like that. Nick Knight has been such a pioneer in those things. But I explained to Lee—that’s what we call him in England, Alexander McQueen—that for me Homogenic was an album that had this contrast in it. Because I had just done two albums, Debut and Post, where I traveled the world, and did interviews, and became this representative of Iceland. And it was almost like a cliché, like I was this elf, eskimo from up North, which wasn’t true, you know ?

And I went to Spain and wrote this album. And I tapped into what I felt truly was Icelandic. It wasn’t the cliché. It was more romantic Icelandic strings and the beats on this album are distorted, they sound like volcanoes. That for me is very patriotic. But at the same time, I was saying to Lee, I’m like the most global citizen from Iceland. When I’m in Iceland, I’m like the cosmopolitan, you know. When I’m in New York, I’m like the Icelandic person. So it’s an interesting contrast.

So my idea was to call the album Homogenic, which was about how I’m from one place, but I wanted this to be from 10 different places. So this is like, Indian, no this is from Africa, this is Mexican, this is Japanese, this is European manicure and then the eyes are kind of robot contact lenses. So for a lot of people this image passed off as a Japanese thing, maybe because of the background, but we were trying to make up a person, a warrior queen, that was from every culture. But I didn’t come up with this. It was Alexander McQueen’s idea. » Time - Mars 2015